Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, the Droplets suit alleges that the group of tech giants infringe on one or more of two patents it holds “for developing and delivering highly functional and scalable applications over the Internet.” The company seeks damages as well as future royalties on the use of those patents.

The two patents in question are United States Patent No. 6,687,745, titled “System and method for delivering a graphical user interface of remote applications over a thin bandwidth connection,” and No. 7,502,838, titled “System and method for delivering remotely stored applications and information.” The No. 6,687,745 patent was granted in February 2004 with the No. 7,502,838 patent following in March 2009.

In its suit, Droplets specifically points to the defendants as infringing with their “Web applications and software” as well as the computers that store and serve those pages. Included by name are the front pages of Yahoo, Amazon, and Apple’s Web sites, along with Apple’s movie trailer page, and Yahoo’s Mail and Maps properties.

One of the aforementioned patents was the focus of a 2006 lawsuit against Adobe that accused the company of infringing on the No. 6,687,745 patent with its Flex product, which Adobe got through its acquisition of Macromedia. The two companies settled in 2008 for an undisclosed sum.

source from: news.cnet

As noted by 9to5mac this afternoon, Apple is giving developers a chance to try out iTunes Match on their own music libraries ahead of the release this fall.

iTunes Match is the service that scans a user’s library to find music that they may have ripped from a CD, but did not purchase from Apple, and cross references it with Apple’s own library. If it finds a match, it provides a user with a license of the full-quality track, as long as they’re a paid subscriber.

In a surprise move, Apple’s quietly added the option to stream tracks for iTunes Match users. When the feature was first introduced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, there was only mention of tracks being downloaded before being played. That functionality was discovered and detailed by Apple blog Insanely Great Macthis evening.

As part of the test plan, Apple’s giving developers access to the iTunes Match service free of charge ahead of the release, along with three months free. The plan itself runs 12 months, costs $24.99 a year, and covers 25,000 songs in a user’s library.

In order to use the service, Apple notes developers need to be running the latest beta of iOS 5, and a new beta version of iTunes 10.5.

As with previous software-driven initiatives, Apple has given developers early access to iCloud features ahead of its launch this fall. Developers have already gotten access to iCloud iOS device backup through the iOS 5 beta program, as well as early versions of its iWork apps, and the iCloud.com Web site.

source from: news.cnet

Apple is contributing more than half the total $4.5 billion price tag for Nortel patents, with partners including Microsoft and Sony combined kicking in the rest.

Apple reported on Wednesday in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it will contribute about $2.6 billion toward the cost of the Nortel patent acquisition.

After filing for bankruptcy protection in 2009, Nortel has been selling off pieces of its business. It recently auctioned off its portfolio of about 6,000 patents.

A consortium that includes Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Research In Motion, EMC and Ericsson had the winning $4.5 billion bid. As Apple noted in its SEC filing, the offer is still subject to regulatory approval.

The patents are particularly valuable to companies that make mobile products that have become litigious in recent years as competition in the growing smartphone market heats up.

The winning bid for the patents dwarfed an earlier $900 million offer from Google, which is under attack by many companies since the success of its Android OS.

While Apple already had a better patent position than Google, it may have been interested in a major ownership position in the Nortel patents in hopes of shoring up its defenses.

Apple is involved in legal battles with a number of Android phone makers including Samsung, Motorola and HTC.

source from: computerworld

Apple said today that customers had downloaded more than one million copies of Mac OS X Lion from the Mac App Store in the upgrade’s first day of availability.

In a statement, Apple boasted of the initial success of Lion with wording that hinted it had raked in about $30 million.

“In just one day, over one million users bought and downloaded Mac OS X Lion,” Apple said.

Lion is priced at $29.99.

The phrase “bought and downloaded” could be interpreted in other ways, however.

Because Mac owners can download multiple copies of Lion — Apple allows them to pay once, then install the OS on all their personal machines — it’s possible that first-day revenues were far less than $30 million.

Apple also said that Lion was selling “faster than any other OS release in [the company's] history.”

A direct comparison to Lion’s predecessor, Snow Leopard, is impossible: Apple did not release early sales figures for that operating system after its August 2009 debut.

In September 2009, retail research firm estimated that Snow Leopard sold twice as many copies in its first two weeks than its predecessor, 2007′s Leopard, and almost quadruple the number posted by Tiger, which shipped in 2005.

Snow Leopard sold for $100 less than Leopard or Tiger, one reason why that edition flew off the shelves, NPD Group analyst Stephen Baker said two years ago.

In October 2007, Apple claimed that it had sold or delivered 2 million copies of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in the first fours days. But the Leopard number included copies installed on new Macs sold during that stretch.

Causes for Lion’s faster sales pace could range from a larger number of Macs in use now than in 2009 — Apple has sold 28.5 million Macs worldwide since Snow Leopard’s launch — to its online-only distribution, which doesn’t require customers to drive to a physical store or wait for an online order to be delivered.

Apple plans to sell Lion on a USB flash drive for $69 next month, and the company also sells Lion Server for $49.99 as an add-on/upgrade to Lion.

Not surprisingly, Lion has held the top spot in the Mac App Store’s bestseller list since it’s launch early Wednesday. As of 6 p.m. ET, Lion Server was in the No. 3 position on the paid-app list.

By late Thursday, Lion had collected over 9,500 customer ratings, and boasted a collective score of 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Lion can be downloaded from the Mac App Store and installed on most Macs running Snow Leopard 10.6.6 and later.

source from: computerworld

Need to tweak that presentation before the all important meeting but only have your iPhone in your pocket? No problem. Just download the Keynote App for iOS from iTunes for $9.99 (or free for exisiting iWork or iPad customers) and get working. The app version of Pages and Numbers were also launched today.

By incorporating its multi-touch interface into the popular iWork suite previously only available for Mac, and adapting it for mobile devices with limited screen real estate, Apple wants to help you “create amazing presentations, documents and spreadsheets right in the palm of your hand,” according to Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

• Keynote: Create multimedia presentations complete with animated charts and transitions. You can play your presentation in full screen view on your iOS device or connect to a projector or HDTV. There is also a Keynote Remote app on iTunes that transforms your iPhone or iPod touch into a remote control for your presentation ($0.99).
  
• Pages: When working on complex documents that are often much bigger than the display of your iOS device, Smart Zoom automatically zooms in to follow the cursor while you’re editing and zooms back out when you’re done.
  
• Numbers: Multi-touch gestures, a virtual keyboard, SmartZoom and over 250 functions make it easier to create and navigate spreadsheets/tables/charts on a mobile device.
  

The Keynote, Pages and Numbers apps are compatible with iWork for Mac and Microsoft Office documents. You can manage files more easily by using “intuitive gestures” to move and organize digital content in thumbnail images. Files can also be shared without exiting the app by clicking on the “Tools” button in the toolbar, according to the press release. They will work on everything from iPad (1& 2 running iOS 4.2.8), iPhone (3GS & 4) to iPod touch (3rd and 4th generation only).

I don’t expect most users will be creating complex newsletters from scratch using the Pages app on their iPod touch but these apps will probably come in handy for minor and on-the-go fixes and edits. I think the more tactile interface could make these apps very intuitive to use — for example, touching a particular cell on a spreadsheet rather than moving a cursor via mouse clicks seems to make much more sense. At the same time, fingers on a multi-layered document on a small display could cause more problems than it solves. These apps may make more sense on the iPad than on the touch.

Give the Keynote, Pages and Numbers app a try and let me know if they run as well as they sound?

source from: zdnet

In a major rebalancing of the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index, which will go into effect ahead of the market open on May 2, the exchange aims to better reflect the current market values of several significant companies. For example, Apple’s weighting on the Nasdaq 100 is currently more than six times that of Microsoft, even though Apple’s market value is only 46 percent larger, according to data from Bloomberg.

As a result, Apple will see the portion that its shares represent on the index drop to 12.33 percent from 20.49 percent, a decline of more than 8 percentage points and the largest individual change. Microsoft’s weighting will increase to 8.32 percent from 3.41 percent, a gain of almost 5 percentage points and the largest increase.

The need to rebalance the index was driven partly by the huge gains in Apple’s stock price over the past couple of years, says The Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Overall, the move will affect mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and other instruments that mirror the performance of the Nasdaq 100 and is likely to result in a flurry of trading as money managers scramble to rejigger their holdings.

Apple, in particular, could be in store for some aggressive selling. Its shares fell more than 3 percent today in early morning trading just past 6:30 am EST, according to Bloomberg, though they’ve since climbed back up.

“This would probably affect international funds, given that Apple is such a big company globally,” Pengana Capital money manager Tim Schroeders told Bloomberg. “Passive funds in particular will be forced to reweight into those stocks that have had increases in weightings, and in the short term we will see some selling pressure on Apple.”

Other tech players, including Cisco, Google, Intel, and Oracle will see their weightings grow by several percentage points. Every company on the index will be affected by the rebalancing, though the weightings of most will go up or down by only a fraction of a percentage point. Overall, only 18 of the 100 companies tracked will see an increase in their weightings.

In a presentation on its Web site (PDF), the Nasdaq explained that it started looking into rebalancing the Nasdaq 100 index early last year after it found that the weightings assigned to certain stocks were no longer accurately reflecting their real market values following an initial rebalancing in 1998.

The new rebalancing will go into effect May 2 and be based on the shares in the Nasdaq-100 as of March 31

source from: cnet

A computer support and repair outfit, Rescuecom creates its rankings by comparing the number of computers shipped by each manufacturer with the number of support calls Rescuecom receives for that same maker. Rescuecom says that reliability depends on both the quality of components and the strength of customer support. If that support is lousy, customers will go looking for third-party options like Rescuecom.

According to Rescuecom’s analysis, Macs had an 8 percent market share in the four quarters of 2009, but accounted for only 2.2 percent share of service calls. That gives Apple a score of 365, well ahead of rivals like Asus and Levono (tied at 305), and way ahead of Toshiba (199) and HP (149). But Apple’s score is a bit below the 374 it received in the third quarter report for 2009, and well under the 394 it got in the second.

Nonetheless, the good news for Apple comes at the same time as word that the company has claimed the number three position in BusinessWeek’s annual customer service survey.

Don’t expect the results to soothe those irate buyers of the 27-inch iMacs with yellow-tinted or cracked displays. But kudos to the folks in Cupertino for maintaining their shiny brand.

Source:itnews.com